The thing I keep coming back to is in order to be effective, much of comedy needs to regularly surprise its audience, an historically this brought comedy to try to transgress boundaries of taste and expectations. But eventually, everything gets old. One hardly needs to open Twitter or a Newspaper these days to get a…

Realistically, it seems that the money one pays to get their game onto Steam should be proportional to the curation tier the game lands in. If the money that goes towards Steam direct goes to pay a team of actual human beings whose job it is to separate your SuperHots from your Slaughtering Grounds, so that people…

I’m pretty sure I want to bang like half the characters in Dragon Age 4 too...

It’s too much to hope for the option to completely filter out Steam Direct games, and a curated list of “the best of Steam Direct” right?

Having never played a Saint’s Row or Grand Theft Auto in my life before, last year I decided to give Saint’s Row a shot. But instead of playing it straight through, I decided to play it in reverse order : starting with Gat out of Hell and finishing with the original. From this perspective, I felt like 4 was clearly…

Preventing infinite combos is less of an issue in a 3v3 fight than a 1v1 fight. Even putting aside issues about “they stopped patching MvC3 when the license expired”,“physically executing the button presses for these things is difficult”, and “it does kinda”, the worst case scenario is generally “you’re down one of…

In a 3.0 campaign one time I played a Dwarf Paladin that was in fact an archdemidracolich with amnesia and a hat of disguise nailed to the approximately dwarf-sized dragon skull who thought she was a dwarf.

Wouldn’t “refusing to cover a game because it’s broken” prevent you from “reporting on how broken the new game is” which is sort of the opposite of what you want from a journalistic organization?

A while back I realized that in all of the “create a single character” sorts of games I would always gravitate towards the palest skin tone, being a person who has goes straight from “corpselike pallor” to “sunburned”. So I’ve consciously tried to play as people with more varied skin tones.

This sounds like the first Bioware game I have no interest in since MDK2.

Wasn’t the reason SFxT was debuted with a non-standard tournament format was that the folks at Evo didn’t want to embarrass Capcom (a major sponsor of the event) by lampshading that it was fairly underwhelming compared to the other games on the main stage at Evo? Between the poor netcode, the DLC fiasco, the…

I mean, more than anything else in the AAA space I want Obsidian to get another crack at Fallout. But wanting something to be true doesn’t make it true. Now that Psychonauts 2 is in development, “the former Black Isle folks get another shot at Fallout” is #1 with a bullet on my wishlist.

Even if you wanted to tell a story that took the politics of the Deus Ex world really seriously as parallels for real world stuff (which they apparently did not given the game they shipped), the language and imagery they used were evocative of questions of race, and “race” isn’t really the best lens for looking at…

I think, though, that as an artist you have to realize that people are living in a big crazy world, and things are going to happen, and you’re going to have to pick your battles. These days people hear “ISIS” and they don’t think “Egyptian God” they think “Terrorists” and you have to recognize that. Adam Reed and…

But since “Black Lives Matter” was created, you realize the connection and how that’s going to look and you shelve that particular piece of concept art and not release it.

I really wonder how much Mankind Divided was hurt by its marketing campaign (which was pretty awful). Certainly you can make a game about prejudice towards cybernetically augmented people, but even so throwing things like “mechanical apartheid” and “augs lives matter” in your marketing shows you’re not really going…

Got to run through the now deeper dungeon with a lot of the alternative characters. Learning to play again with Monk or Dove (or Bolt, ouch) is going to be tough.

Ash is ultimately not a bad character, but using Chief Williams and Navigator Pressley as the window to the “Humanity First/I don’t trust aliens ma’am” viewpoint was somewhat clumsily executed. This is the sort of thing that Bioware has gotten progressively better at (presenting viewpoints that a player might find…

Considering that Bioware generally writes companions and members of the protagonist’s inner circle to represent and speak for specific viewpoints, cultures, or ideologies (Wrex is your window into “what Krogan think”, “the Iron Bull is your authority on the Qun”, etc.) it’s far from unreasonable for at least one of…

I feel like this is specifically the niche that Fig, as opposed to Kickstarter fill. It presents a safer proposition for the consumer than Kickstarter does, since they don’t let just anybody put up a game on Fig. It’s more of a space specifically for “Big Indies” (notably Obsidian, InXile, and Double Fine, who…